I love working in my StudioKitlchen. These are the views from my drafting desk/kitchen island … starting work on a Christmas painting for my niece Aubri … an oversized rendering of her bulldog puppy, Winston. He’s darling. I won’t finish by Tuesday, Christmas Eve, but I’ll show her the underpainting and then finish next week.
During the reclamation of this space, we took out all the built in cabinets, which were probably added to the house in the 50’s. Originally the kitchen would have had free standing cupboards, as it does now … my motive was not to remodel with slavish historical accuracy, heaven forbid. I just like the texture and look of the old wooden surfaces … and also having plenty of room to hang artwork.
Pictured around the Yellow Cupboard are Santa Knows Son of Man; oil sketch of a model whose name I can’t remember; one of the impenetrable Unseen Architecture pieces, this one painted on the porch of Ann Tracey’s Folly Island beach house; a funky string instrument with a neat carved face; three Belgian ceramic chickens; the amazing Alia Atreides; and self portrait in gray sweater. On the Bright Red Refrigerator wall are Dreamy Dark Landscape, done by an unknown art student thirty years ago; Einstein Santa Knows; Steve Jobs Santa Knows; a symbolic landscape, one of the first things I ever painted, which oddly makes a lot more sense to me now than it did twenty years ago; a lovely woodblock print by Tony Roati in 1987; Red Fredrick study I did in preparation for the larger portrait of this subject; and Rowers, a charcoal drawing I did several years ago … with a great frame from a company called … I’m not kidding … The Bad Ass Frame Company. And yes, there’s another wall but I’ll post that later … for now I have to get back to Winston.
